How to buy a love of reading

I was concerned about two possible outcomes when I first read the cover flap to How to Buy a Love of Reading: the first that the book would be overwrought with literary devices, self-referential and self-deferential – obsessed with its own cleverness, the second that as a “young adult” book, the writing would be so simplistic, so easy to read, that it would not be worth my time.

Gibson walks a narrow line without ever venturing into either extreme in this novel, which is filled with a rich and moving narrative, well-depicted and sympathetic characters and metafictional devices, theme, tone and point-of-view. It is not only the sort of book that one can read many times to find out what it is “really about” (and certainly, because it is the sort of book that makes one hark back to their own exposure to the concept of literature as more than narrative, I was tempted midway through to sit down and write a 5 paragraph essay about the Dark Journey and Coming of Age imagery.) but also the sort of book wherein “stuff happens” and the reader cares about what will happen.

The writing is elegant, readable, funny and terribly, terribly sad. It is easy to identify with parts of each of the (many) characters, while despising others. Ultimately, it is a book about narrative, as each of the main characters has a different struggle with living their own narrative – Hunter who lives his life according to his own internal narration, Carley, who rewrites her life in Aftermemory, Bree who is so self-conscious and defensive that she invents literary devices in her life and Justin, who does not live at all, rather inventing the story of his life to be printed in the papers.